"It feels like Facebook is waiting for someone to die"

While Facebook has been reluctant to publicly acknowledge how well Trump used its social network to reach voters, it has celebrated the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign internally as one of the most imaginative uses of the company’s powerful advertising platform. In addition to interviews with Trump campaign staffers and former Facebook employees, BuzzFeed News obtained company presentations and memos that show the social media giant viewed Trump’s campaign as an “innovator” of a fast-moving, test-oriented approach to marketing on Facebook. 

The new policy raises questions that company officials said are too early to answer, including who its partners will be and what the criteria will be to become one. A Facebook spokeswoman said she couldn’t provide a list of organizations Facebook plans to team up with or countries where they could deploy this new policy.

It also isn’t clear how those partners will determine whether or not content is false or could lead to violence. Nor was it clear how Facebook would ensure those organizations remain independent or relatively free from political bias. 

Denis Nikitin is a Russian neo-Nazi soccer hooligan and mixed martial arts fight promoter, who in recent years has attempted to grow his influence across Europe and in the United States. He is also the founder of White Rex, a clothing brand that openly supports white nationalism and whose logo is a mix of the swastika with other far-right symbols.

White Rex is currently selling some of its T-shirts for around $35 a piece on an actively updated official Facebook page that has almost 13,000 followers. 

Facebook and Instagram will more proactively lock the accounts of users its moderators encounter and suspect are below the age of 13. Its former policy was to only investigate accounts if they were reported specifically for being potentially underage. But Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that an “operational” change to its policy for reviewers made this week will see them lock the accounts of any underage user they come across, even if they were reported for something else, such as objectionable content, or are otherwise discovered by reviewers. Facebook will require the users to provide proof that they’re over 13, such a government-issued photo ID, to regain access. The problem stems from Facebook not requiring any proof of age upon signup.

The fact that Google News thinks the four most important stories about the summit all come from or are based on Fox News is just stunning. Especially considering that the fallout from the press conference included criticism of Trump from conservative voices like Bob Corker, Lindsey Graham and John McCain. 

A broadcasting organization backed by the federal government has used Facebook to target ads at United States citizens, in potential violation of longstanding laws meant to protect Americans from domestic propaganda.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which typically broadcasts to audiences in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, bought several ads on Facebook in recent days that were targeted at users in the United States. The ads included several human-interest stories about Russia and a graphic about NATO’s popularity. As with other state-funded media organizations, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is mostly restricted by law from promoting its content in the United States except on request.

It’s not clear whether the administrators behind the group intended to target survivors of abuse from the beginning. In part that’s because it’s impossible to tell who created it in the first place. The administrator of the group was a Facebook page. Facebook doesn’t require pages to publicize the individual users behind them, and so they effectively provide a way to shield the identity of a group’s administrators.

The ability to create groups that aren’t tied to specific Facebook profiles serves a legitimate purpose; a nonprofit might want to create a group tied to its name rather than to the identity of its social media manager, for example. Yet that same ability allows bad actors to masquerade as legitimate, a loophole exploited by Russian propagandists and others during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

YouTube has terminated the FamilyOFive account that belonged to Maryland parents Mike and Heather Martin. Both parents were charged with child neglect last fall, sentence to five years probation, and lost custody of two of their five children after using the kids to make viral prank videos that featured depictions of child abuse. Pressure has been mounting on YouTube to take action against the account after it was discovered the Martins were still active on the platform. The account’s most recent video was posted four days ago.

The problem for newsrooms is threefold: how to identify sophisticated manipulations, how to educate audiences without ​inducing apathy and deepening mistrust​, and how to keep the growth of this technology from casting doubt on legitimate and truthful stories.

Perhaps the biggest challenge will be managing the multifaceted levels of difficulty, says Mandy Jenkins, the director of news for Storyful, a social intelligence platform that many newsrooms rely on for verification of user-generated content. 

I discovered that the age ratings in the App Store are, at times, completely random. While nearly all news apps like the New York Times, CNN, BuzzFeed News, the Los Angeles Times, and HuffPost were rated for ages 12+, there were only two major news outlets with an age 4+ rating: Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

So for a week or two, I got all my news (on my phone, at least) from alerts on the Fox News app. Boy, that was a strange time!

“I wanted to demonstrate how much data Venmo was making publicly available with their open API and their public by default settings and encourage people to consider their privacy settings,” Joel Guerra, the creator of the bot, told Motherboard in an email.

It’s now a weekly, if not daily, occurrence: A video is posted on Facebook or Twitter showing a white person calling police on black people for minor violations or nothing at all, a new form of social media shaming that’s exposed the everyday racism black Americans face and brought swift repercussions for the perpetrators.

Tagged with nicknames like BBQ Becky and Permit Patty, white people who’ve reported black people for sitting in Starbucks, shopping at CVS, mowing lawns, playing golf, staying at an Airbnb or napping on a couch in a college dorm are being publicly named, mocked and, in some cases, fired from their jobs. 

Instagram is adding a new feature that’s ripped right out of AOL Instant Messenger — a helpful green dot next to your friend’s profile pictures that lets you know that they’re online to message.

The new status indicator dot will show up in a few places in the app, including your Instagram Direct inbox and the share menu. Status indicators will only show up for friends who already follow you or for people who you’ve talked to before in Instagram Direct messages, and you’ll be able to both hide your status from others and turn off the feature completely if you want.

The company has launched a feature in Messenger that pulls in your contacts from Instagram, if you opt to connect your account. The option appears in Messenger’s “People” tab, alongside the existing option to sync your phone’s contacts with Messenger.

In response to criticism about the social network’s failure to address the spread of falsehoods and offensive content on its site, Facebook apologized Thursday for giving Mark Zuckerberg a platform. “Lies and harassment have absolutely no place on Facebook, and we want to express our deep regret at offering someone like Mark Zuckerberg a space to spread his clearly abhorrent views,” said Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management.

While most of the country is thrashing Facebook , I’d like to send Mark Zuckerberg a thank-you note. His social-media site enabled me to find and maintain close contact with my second cousin Kelly Warshofsky during the last five years of her life.

Robbin Young said she “fell madly in love” with a Twitter user named Guccifer 2.0 - sending him topless photos and exchanging raunchy messages him.

She was left stunned last week after the US government announced it had indicted 12 Russian spies who they believe ran the Guccifer 2.0 account, hacked into Democratic party computers and leaked stolen documents in a bid to interfere with the 2016 election result.

In an exclusive interview, Robbin, 63, told Sun Online: “I thought he was one Romanian man and I fell in love with him - now to be told it could have been 12 Russian spies running that account - I’m shocked.

"If this is all true it’s like I’ve had Twitter sex with 12 Russian hackers.”